Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that began in 1917 by the playwright Guillaume Apollinaire. The movement grew out of Dadaism, a protest to the emptiness of the civilized world as World War I unfolded.
Sigmund Freud's work was gaining popularity at this time, and his work emphasized the subconscious, which was adopted by the surrealists. This is demonstrated in dreamscapes and drawing without an apparent visual model (automatism). In 1924, André Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto, which defined surrealism as:

"Psychic automatism… [is] the actual functioning of thought… dictated by the thought.”

Surrealist artists champion the philosophy and surprise artists with fantastic images of the subconscious mind.